Bonnie Wai-Lee Kwong

Bonnie Wai-Lee Kwong, Patrick Cahill, Nancy J. Morales, Terry Ehret, Moira Magneson

6 APRIL 2025 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading to celebrate the Sixteen Rivers Press featured titles for 2025, Bonnie Wai-Lee Kwong, the department of peace, Patrick Cahill, If we are the forest the animals dream, Moira Magneson, In the Eye of the Elephant, and Terry Ehret and Nancy J. Morales, award-winning co-translators of Plagios/Plagiarisms, Volume III, poems by Ulalume González de León, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, refreshments, free, 3:00 pm PDT (poetryflash.org).


Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series. Featured books will be available for signing at the reading. This event will be posted on the Poetry Flash YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UClwdR-uPFNz7XxbBbLcnoEA.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Patrick Cahill's new poetry book is If we are the forest the animals dream. Erin Rodoni says, "These poems remind me of looking up at a forest canopy, the way the crowns of trees don't touch, leaving channels of light between them. Each line is etched like a leaf against the sky." His previous collection is The Machinery of Sleep. He's also the contributing editor for the anthology Digging Our Poetic Roots: Poems for Sonoma County and cofounder and editor of Ambush Review. His poetry has appeared in The Daguerreian Annual, Left Curve, and elsewhere. He lives in San Francisco, where he volunteers with San Francisco Recreation and Parks in habitat restoration.
Terry Ehret and Nancy J. Morales are co-translators of Plagios/Plagiarisms, Volume III, poems by Ulalume González de León. Terry Ehret's previous poetry collections include Night Sky Journey, Lucky Break, Translations from the Human Language, and Lost Body. Her literary awards include the National Poetry Series, California Book Award, Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, Northern California Book Award for California Poetry in Translation (with Nancy J. Morales), and eight Pushcart Prize nominations. She served as Sonoma County Poet Laureate, 2004-2006. Nancy J. Morales served as a board member for the Northern California Chapter of the Fulbright Alumni Association and teaches Spanish to private clients. Besides receiving the NCBA for California Poetry in Translation, she also received a Pushcart nomination. Nancy J. Morales lives in Napa County. About Plagios/Plagiarisms, Volume III, Amanda Moore says, "This third and final volume of Ulalume González de León's Plagios is a triumph, a culmination of some of the most compelling elements of her poetic works: Here is de León's exploration of found and familiar language, her curiosity and playfulness, her embrace of the everyday alongside the poetic."
Moira Magneson's new poetry book is In the Eye of the Elephant. Albert Garcia says, "I am drawn to Moira Magneson's poems for the grime and gristle of their language—"elisions and plosives swept / piecemeal and stained // off the slaughterhouse floor"—for storytelling that stares pai in the face and delivers a hard-earned, unexpected beauty that is possible because of a clear-eyed placement in the natural world." Her previous book is A River Called Home: A River Fable, an illustrated novella. Her poetry has appeared in Margie, Verse Daily, Runes, Rattlesnake Review, Hanging Loose, and elsewhere. In 2024, she was the resident poet for ForestSong, a community arts project exploring solastalgia, biophilia, and resilience in the face of wildfire devastation. She lives in the Sierra Foothills where she has spearheaded many arts actions and initiatives.
Bonnie Wai-Lee Kwong's new poetry book is the department of peace. Maw Shein Win says, "With an unerring eye, [Wai-Lee Kwong] skillfully weaves together charged political critique, complex family experiences, and meditations on the natural world in poems that compel and reveal." Her previous poetry collections include The Quenching and ravel. Her work in poetry and fiction have appeared in journals such as The California Quarterly, The Columbia Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Pedestal, Nimrod, and elsewhere. Liriope, her first play, was staged at Stanford University's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. Her second play, There's No Stopping to My Thoughts, was staged at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center with a grant from the California Arts Council. Renku.earth, an Elixir application she built for writing poetry collaboratively, was a runner-up for the 2024 Elixir Consultancy Prize from the consultancy firm Erlang Solutions. She lives in Hong Kong.